Surf*Mind*Musings

A couple of themes emerged in the Jetpack for Learning finalists:

• Language Learning
  •  ClozeFox
  •  LangLadder (aka MemWord)
• Game-based Learning
  •  NetDetective
  •  Studytroll
• Annotation
  •  HooverNotes
  •  Expression Widgets
• Trails
  •  Mupple
  •  LineHive

I’m personally especially excited to see the Trails implementations as I’ve long regarded that as a missing piece of the Web 2.0+ world.

A couple projects break the mold here: Cohere is superset of annotation in the knowledge construction & management space and part of a larger .edu project. Rubrick facilitates assessment in a collegiate environment.

We’re having great fun at the Design Camp leading into SXSWi, track it via #jet4learning. Looking forward to spending more time on the future of JetPack today and the final presentations.

As I begin to learn my way around the analytics of eBay, I’ve been re-impressed by the sophistication of the inventory and user behavior exploring it. eBay’s tried lots of variants within facted browsing over the years. The core model includes dynamic facets across the taxonomy with the attributes appropriate to the current category.
The desktop search UI ( eBay Desktop) goes beyond even this model with a lot of progressive flyout widgetry for full control over multiple value filters.

One notable issue industry wide for faceted browsing systems is the affordance for reducing the constraints. In this non-ebay example, only the bread crumb enables me to remove my price filter directly. eBay extends the facet removal affordance with checkboxes beside attribute filters. I like download.com’s summary of applied filters and X buttons better as a more salient version of a breadcrumb bar. This model is akin to the early Flamenco project rendering. Read more about faceted browsing interfaces at Marti Hearst’s at searchuserinterfaces.com. I’ll be studying the refinement patterns at eBay for ways to advance the state of the art.

We’re off and running in the Jetpack Learning Challenge from Mozilla Education & the MacArthur Foundation. Brian King did a great job with our first seminar and #2 is scheduled for tomorrow.

I’ve crafted a couple firefox chrome templates for use in paper prototyping and will be talking through choosing the right Jetpack UI option as well as larger issues around UI design in Seminar 2 tomorrow. As part of the larger context, I’m encouraging pre-coding efforts at evaluating concepts and UI expressions.

Get the templates and my presentation materials at lab.mozilla.jetpack. The entries cover a wide range of educational contexts and I’m confident the competition will set a high bar!